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John Unsworth

Huffduffing since June 7th, 2010

I remember as a kid camping in the bush during hot summer nights with a transistor radio and sometimes being able to pick up TV audio. Or driving over night through the country and hearing local stations play country instead of pop. And Saturdays at midday in the truck with dad listening to the Goons. Hear that? that’s the sound of…

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Five years ago, Marketplace explored how machines, robots and software algorithms were increasingly entering the workforce in our series "Robots Ate My Job." Now, we’re looking at what humans can do about it with a new journey to find robot-proof jobs.

The way the Trump administration sees it, the move to harden our borders is about national security and preserving jobs in the U.S. But moving forward, the real competition for work may come from machines, software and robots. Some jobs will be replaced, some jobs will be changed and some jobs will thrive.

Dave Rollinson is in that third category. Five years ago, Rollinson was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University studying snake robots used for search and rescue. Now he’s a co-founder of HEBI Robotics, a startup that makes electronic building blocks that serve as the shoulder, elbow or knee of almost any robot someone might construct.

"We were kind of inspired by Lego," Rollinson said. "We want to get to the point where people can put these together as easily and intuitively as Lego."
If HEBI can manage to do that, there could be a big payoff. But for now, his No. 1 worry is finding people with the right skills to hire.
"You’ve whittled your set down to probably, like, a handful of people in the world that can really do what it is that you’re trying to do," Rollinson said. "It’s probably our No. 1 concern as we grow is just finding the right people."

Sociology professor and author John Carroll takes issue with the “excessive fearfulness” he argues is common in modern Western upper-middle-class life, illustrated by the paranoia about children being abducted that impels parents to chauffeur them everywhere. The reality is that they live in suburbs in which the statistical likelihood of child abduction is infinitesimal.

John Carroll is professor of sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne and author of The Existential Jesus.

The Caribbean island of Jamaica has a long and proud musical history. These days it’s not so much about the reggae, but dancehall, the music that plays day and night on the streets of Kingston.

Former RN scientist in residence Dr Matt Baker happens to love this music. Earlier this year he travelled to Kingston with his friend and literature academic Dr Ben Etherington from Western Sydney Uni. We join them on the streets of Kingston to hear the pulsating sound of dancehall, and to find out why this music is so important to the culture of contemporary Jamaica.

Eugene Debs was the first major Democratic Socialist in American history, running for president five times in the early 1900s. NPR goes on a tour of his home in Terre Haute, Ind., ahead of that state’s primary with Benjamin Kite, an avid Bernie Sanders supporter. Kite, one of the home’s caretakers, says Debs laid the groundwork for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, and likewise Bernie Sanders may be laying the groundwork for a major shift left in American politics.

As you approach whatever it is you’re doing, you have to think “do I want to be like a traditional corporation, a shareholder owned corporation, where the object of the game is to earn and extract enough money from this business, so my grandchildren can inherit enough cash to live their lives? Or do I want to create a business that’s healthy and sustainable enough that it can generate revenue and opportunities for my grandchildren who hopefully will want to join that business?”

The latter is the sort of approach that creates a business that wants to befriend communities. It’s your name on the thing. You don’t want people to hate you the way they hate Uber because that’s you, that’s your kids, that’s your family name, that’s your legacy. You have such a different relationship to it that you start to think of your neighborhood as a legacy and the planet as a legacy and your grandchildren as a legacy and your workers as a legacy. That is who you are. It’s so much more integral than this fractious and abstracted business landscape that we’re seeing die today.

The landscape of what’s possible in web page layout is changing. Jen has a theory that this change will be a big one — perhaps the biggest change to graphic design on the web in over 15 years. Rachel, Jeffrey, and Eric join her to debate if that’s true or not, and to surmise what the future might bring. This special episode was recorded live at An Event Apart Nashville.

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: Digital rights management goes deeper into the Web.
In this episode of the Hardware podcast, we talk with writer and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow. He’s recently rejoined the Electronic Frontier Foundation to fight a World Wide Web Consortium proposal that would add DRM to the core specification for HTML.

When we recorded this episode with Cory, the W3C had just overruled the EFF’s objection. The result, he says, is that “we are locking innovation out of the Web.”
“It is illegal to report security vulnerabilities in a DRM,” Doctorow says.
“[DRM] is making it illegal to tell people when the devices they depend upon for their very lives are unsuited for that purpose.”

In our “Tools” segment, Doctorow tells us about tools that can be used for privacy and encryption, including the EFF surveillance self-defense kit, and Wickr, an encrypted messaging service that allows for an expiration date on shared messages and photos.
“We need a tool that’s so easy your boss can use it,” he says.

Other links:
- In 2014, Nest bought Revolv, maker of a smart home hub. Now Nest is shutting down Revolv’s cloud service, and in the process it’s bricking every Revolv hub that’s already been sold. Consumers may own their hardware, but if it depends on cloud software to run, it operates at someone else’s whim.
- Mark Klein, an AT&T technician who filed a whistleblower suit against AT

Recorded on 7 March 2016 at Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

Online platforms are penetrating the organisation of societies, disrupting private and public sectors. What is their impact on the governance of public life and social order?

José van Dijck is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sonia Livingstone (@Livingstone_S) is Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.
Andrew Murray (@AndrewDMurray) is Professor of Law with particular reference to New Media and Technology Law at LSE.

LSE Law (@lselaw) is an integral part of the School’s mission, plays a major role in policy debates & in the education of lawyers and law teachers from around the world.

The Department of Media and Communications (@MediaLSE) undertakes outstanding and innovative research and provides excellent research-based graduate programmes for the study of media and communications. The Department was established in 2003 and in 2014 our research was ranked number 1 in the most recent UK research evaluation, with 91% of research outputs ranked world-leading or internationally excellent.

A hundred years ago, at the height of WWI, Britain and France signed a secret deal carving up the Middle East. The agreement ignored the aspirations of Arabs and created the Middle East we are still living with today.

The agreement was named after the two men who crafted it—Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. Sykes was a British Conservative MP, and assistant to the secretary of state for war, Lord Kitchener.

Georges-Picot had ambitions to become a lawyer, but in 1898 joined the French foreign office, the Quai d’Orsay, as a junior diplomat.

Guests:
Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University in America.